From the Greek, this verse literally means that the God of Peace, or the God where peace comes from, will do the crushing of Satan under your feet. In ancient times, when a king defeated another king, he would symbolically place his foot on the neck of the king he defeated. It symbolizes the complete subjugation and possession and defeat of the captured king. This can be seen in Joshua 10:24 and Psalm 110:1. This was an act meant to humiliate the king or defeated foe.
If you notice the Romans 16 passage says God will crush Satan under your feet. This is a picture of God the King of peace, defeating Satan, and then instead of Him placing His foot on the neck of the enemy, he allows His son or daughter (and ultimately the Church, the bride of Christ) to place their foot on the neck of the enemy as a sign of victory. But who did the fighting? I am sure we can all say we have done our fair share of spiritual warfare, but the majority of the credit for fighting does not go to us, it goes to the God of peace. It is then after he has won, he allows us to place our foot on the enemies' neck, and not only place it there, God will crush him under your foot. The picture that comes to mind is of a person placing his foot on Satan's neck and then God placing His foot on top of ours as a symbol of who really defeated him. We may do what we think is a lot of warfare in fighting the enemy and even refusing to follow the wicked schemes he throws at us. But the picture here is not us doing the majority of the fighting. God does. We may help, but God does the fighting and God places Satan under our feet so that He can crush him, or destroy the work that he attempted to destroy us with.
That is good news to me. I have felt many times that I was the only one fighting and had to put all my effort into fighting and God just watched to see what the outcome would be. But Paul reminds us with his word picture that God did the fighting for us and we just got to have the privilege of being there when it happened. This did not happen in recent times, it happened when Jesus went to the cross. Jesus died, descended to hell and rose again in order that we might be free from the curse that Satan attempts to throw at us.
Even further, the Greek word for crush is even more intense. It does not mean crush like you step on a bug, it literally means to destroy, to shatter. It is in the 3rd person singular which means that God Himself will shatter, destroy, crush Satan under your feet. To make it even more intense, the word 'soon' literally means 'with quickness, with speed, and without delay. It is also singular meaning one person will do the crushing, meaning God Himself will do the crushing immediately. It was done a long time ago.
'But (I can hear you think) it sure doesn't feel like he is crushed. He fights me a lot and attempts to destroy me'. You have to understand something; Satan wants you to think he is still able to defeat you. If he can make you think he can defeat you he can. Satan is the ultimate deceiver. He loves to psych us out and make us think he is more powerful than he really is. Jesus has won the battle for us along time ago. All we have to do is remind that deceiver who has really won and then allow God to crush him once again under our feet. Get angry at the enemy; remind him of his crushing that he received from the God of peace. If you feel the enemy coming against you, call out to Jesus. Stand firm, but do not cower and let him win the battle of wits. You have won through Jesus. You have the victory through the God of peace. Why can I be confident of this? Because God's word tells us in 1 John 3:7 that "the Son of God came to destroy these works of the Devil." So when the enemy comes at you to try and tell you otherwise, you can say with confidence that the works of Devil are destroyed once and for all. It is something you can be sure of even when your circumstances and your thoughts and feelings tell you otherwise.
No comments:
Post a Comment